Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 16, 2022 21 tweets 7 min read Read on X
People like the idea of solar farms in the abstract, but hundreds of communities around the world are currently fighting them because they require 300-600x more land than other energy sources, produce 300x more toxic waste, and devastate critical wildlife habitats.
Many rich nations dump used solar panels and batteries on poor African nations

nytimes.com/2019/05/12/cli…
Other rich nations send used solar panels to "landfills where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium."

latimes.com/business/story…
By 2035 there will be 3x more used solar panels than new ones, which will make them 4x more expensive.
"The economics of solar," wrote Harvard Business Review researchers, "would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."

hbr.org/2021/06/the-da…
Solar farms are killing the critically threatened desert tortoises. "A team of biologists relocated 139 tortoises from their habitat to make way for the solar panels...In a span of a few weeks, 30 tortoises were killed."

reviewjournal.com/news/science-a…
Wind turbines chop the wings off of big, endangered, slow-to-reproduce birds. "USGS scientists concluded that if anticipated growth in wind energy by 2040 occurs, increased turbine-caused deaths could cut golden eagle populations by half over 10 years."

apnews.com/article/scienc…
After wind turbines spend decades killing threatened species, their blades are sent to landfills because it's too expensive to recycle them. (That little object in the upper right of the photo is a tractor burying the blades.)

bloomberg.com/news/features/… Image
Communities around the world are fighting back against the imposition of environmentally-destructive solar and wind projects by bankers, coastal elites, and subsidy-farmers. Over 40 townships have blocked or restricted projects in Ohio alone this year.

realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/…
If you would like to fight one of these hideous, environmentally-destructive projects in your own community, you can reach out to @LinowesLisa who is organizing a worldwide movement that is successfully fighting back.

wecprotect.org
We must ban all solar panels imported from China. They are being made by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims against whom genocide is being committed. They're cheap because they're made with slave labor. The subsidy for solar is blood money.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/ban-chinese-…
It's easy to calculate the massive impact of solar and wind projects. Just draw a circle around an energy project and divide by the amount of electricity they produce. Here are calculations from around the world.

environmentalprogress.org/power-density-…
The low energy density of sunlight and wind is why solar and wind projects require so much land and mining. It's why they can't power a high-energy civilization. And it's why the end of the renewables craze is near.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/end-of-renew…
What about batteries? Also made by enslaved Muslims in China. For fundamental moral reasons, we must ban all solar panels and batteries made in China.

nytimes.com/2022/06/20/bus…
Rainforests are being ravaged for the toxic elements required for renewables and batteries

apnews.com/article/techno…
Q: What about the waste from other sources of energy like nuclear?

A:

Why do people even put solar panels on land when they should go on rooftops? Because rooftop solar is ~2x more expensive

But I agree we should:

1. Ban large-scale solar
2. Ban Chinese solar genocide panels
3. Require solar developers to pay the cost of long-term waste disposal

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More from @shellenberger

Oct 8
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer. Image
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.Image
Read 5 tweets
Oct 8
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳 Image
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.Image
Read 8 tweets
Sep 28
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations. Image
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.

Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.

Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.

x.com/shellenberger/…
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 27
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
This article in the left-wing UK magazine @NewStatesman details how Ellison bankrolled Starmer's Digital ID push.

This is not a partisan issue. Freedom lovers on the Left and Right should both aggressivley oppose digital totalitarianism.

Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.

Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.

Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
Read 7 tweets
Sep 27
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
Stop your creepy totalitarianism @sundarpichai @Google Image
@sundarpichai @Google UK opposition vs support of digital IDs is 45 to 42.

Opponents should be able to drive that opposition number up significantly.

It is absolutely essential that the UK kill two-tier @Keir_Starmer plan for digital IDs before they metastasize across the West. Image
Read 18 tweets
Sep 24
The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.
To his credit, Senator @timkaine reversed his position on natural rights a few days after the hearing. “Of course, I embrace the view, expressed so clearly in the Declaration of Independence authored by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that all people are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I accept the Senator Kaine's change of mind, but he misrepresents the hearing by saying "Of course..."

Nobody who watches Kaine pedantically lecture State Department official Riley Barnes and walk away thinking Kaine agrees with the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Notably, Kaine placed his oped describing his change of mind on natural rights at Fox where no MSNBC viewer is at any risk of reading it.

foxnews.com/opinion/sen-ti…
@timkaine According to the New Atheists the New Atheists failed like all scientism fails. They couldn't explain reality or deliver a positive vision or affirmative program. Their entire project rests on really dumb assumptions about reality and nature.

Read 4 tweets

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